Many companies place a high priority on the protection of data. In the business world, the data that a company collects and uses is often the company's most important asset, and even a relatively small loss of data or data outage may have a significant impact. In addition, companies are often required to safeguard their data in a manner that complies with various data protection regulations. As a result, many companies have made sizeable investments in data protection and data protection strategies.
As one part of a data protection strategy, many companies perform backups of portions or all of their data. Data backups may be executed on an as-needed basis, but more typically are scheduled to execute on a recurring basis (e.g., nightly, weekly, or the like). Such data backups may serve different purposes. For example, one purpose may be to allow for the recovery of data that has been lost or corrupted. Another purpose may be to allow for the recovery of data from an earlier time—e.g., to restore previous versions of files and/or to restore a last known good configuration.
Backups typically involve making secondary copies of selected data on separate hardware, such as on a separate disk array, tape library, or optical storage device. Backups may be full backups of the selected data, cumulative incremental backups (where all changes since the last full backup are copied), differential incremental backups (where only the portions changed since the last full or cumulative incremental backup are copied), or other appropriate types of backups. Some backup policies may include a combination of these alternatives (e.g., full backups on the weekend, followed by daily cumulative incremental backups during the week). To minimize the impact on normal operations, backups are usually scheduled to occur during time periods when the system usage is expected to be at its lowest, such as late in the evening or during the early morning hours.